The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children Read Free Page B

Delos with a great chain. He then set out against Syros; the people resisted and, when he overcame them, he for the most part sold them into slavery or gave them, women and children, as gifts to his soldiers; then by assault he took several towns upon the mainland (Teos, Myndus, Pidyma); he attacked Miletus, an enemy for many years. The Lesbians (who had long boasted of the strongest fleet in the Aegean basin) came to their aid with forty-five vessels, light craft, with which they were able to thrust suddenly through the Samian line. Polycrates ordered his navy to surround that of the Lesbians, thus making their superior agility useless; and the Samian ships were higher, so their missiles fell more effectually; some Lesbian ships were rammed and sunk, some ripped open, some set on fire and burned, while others were boarded from all sides, the sea filled with broken oars, spars and carnage; and now no prisoners taken, them slain, perishing all, blossoms of manhood swallowed by the whirlpool of bright blue waves, or some bodies washed up and dashed upon the rocks. The Samians now turned toward Lesbos; attacked, raided their harbour and sunk the rest of their fleet, pillaging and setting fire to the cities, to Pyrrha, Eresus, Antissa, Methymna and Mytilene (the reedy laughter of children extinguished beneath the furious roar of war); and they took away the strongest citizens bound, as slaves, while demanding ransom for many others. . . . . . . After this Polycrates sacrificed an entire ship to Hera, burning it to the ground in front of her temple.
    He taxed all ships which passed through his now greatly extended territorial waters, demanded yearly tribute from those cities he had conquered and sold protection to adjacent states. He committed acts of piracy, by open force robbed valuables from all, made no distinction between enemy and friend. “A friend,” he said, “is more grateful if you return what you have taken from him, than if you were lenient from the beginning.” Under Polydor 6 , a portion of his fleet attacked a contingency of Spartan vessels and from them took a huge bronze vase intended as a gift for King Croesus, a vase of three-hundred amphorae, covered with figures of bulls and lions all round the rim, and this was deposited as an offering at the Heraion.
    . . . and the mothers of those Samians who had been slain in battle he allocated to the more wealthy citizens, directing them to take care of the women and look upon them as their own, while the sons he had buried at public expense, their names engraved on a pillar in front of the temple of Pallas Athena.
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    With the newfound sources of revenue he brought enormous wealth to the island, and was quick to turn it to account, expending vast sums on creating prodigious and useful public works.
    In Megara there lived a hydraulic engineer by the name of Eupalinus, who had gained great fame for building at that city an aqueduct and fountainhouse of wonderful beauty and usefulness, with thirty-five octagonal columns of poros stone and walls of limestone blocks in the isodomic system.Polycrates, with promises of high pay, invited him to Samos where, over the course of the next ten years, he constructed a tunnel to supply water to the capital city—a magnificent piece of engineering, a truly extraordinary feat—almost a mile long, carrying the main aqueduct, originating from a copious spring, through Mt. Ampelus. Eupalinus applied his geometric calculations and laid out his line (how difficult considering that from no place on the mountain could the two proposed endpoints of the project be at the same time seen). Two teams of labourers perforated the mountain, working simultaneously from either end. After advancing a designated distance, each team turned somewhat to the right. Then the northern digging team turned sharply to the left, in order to guarantee an intersection with the line of the southern digging team, which occurred after all those years, with